“When Lydia died, Mama shut herself up in her room rather than share her sorrow with us. She felt more comfortable keeping all of us at arm’s length. At the time it made me feel guilty because it seemed that her sorrow was so much greater than ours. But then I began to see that by staying in her room, she ensured there was never a discussion about what had led to Lydia eloping. If you remember, only Aunt Margaret has ever brought up the fact that Mama encouraged Lydia to flirt and act as if she was far older than she was; but I’m sure we’ve all thought it from time to time. I know that I have.”
Looking dumbstruck, Elizabeth refused to meet Jane’s eyes. She had never under-estimated her sister; but she had also never imagined that Jane was this penetrating, this sharp in her observations of their family. Strangely, none of what Jane said was new to her. She had known these things about her mother all along, but never expressed them.
Jane stood up. “I’m not saying that you are like Mama, Lizzy. I think that you are much braver. But it seems to me that if you are frightened, then it can sometimes seem that only way to be totally safe is to cut yourself off from what frightens you. Mama does that. But where is the joy in that sort of life?’
“You take a chance when you fall in love. You bare your soul to someone and they can hurt you. We all know that; but you have to look past the fear. There is uncertainty, but you take the leap anyway. Charles took it. I took it, and now it seems that Darcy has taken it too. I know this is hard, but you have it in you. I will never forget how you were once willing to sacrifice yourself and marry Collins for me. Try to find that bravery for yourself now. It’s time to trust. After all, it’s for your happiness,” she said ruffling her sister’s hair as she passed by and left the room.
____________________________________
Time seemed to go too quickly. Surely not more than half an hour had passed since Jane had left her and yet she could already hear Charles’ heavy steps climbing the stairs and passing her door. She moved towards the mirror and, with a shaking hand, re-tweaked some curls and pinched some colour into her cheeks.
The candlelight flickered and suddenly she felt a tremor. She put a hand to her stomach. She felt strange. Perhaps she was ill. Her head felt light: even empty. Her legs were leaden. It might be wiser to get into bed. At breakfast tomorrow she would explain that she had come down with a sudden illness. Besides, it wasn’t proper to be meeting secretly in the middle of the night.
Then an image of her mother’s fluttering hands floated before her eyes. Jane was right! This was probably the same process that her mother followed when she wanted to avoid exposing her vulnerability to others. And what had been the result of that? Her mother had alienated her own husband and children. Was she going to become someone who denied her own feelings and hid away from others because she feared…she feared? Oh! This was hard…so hard!
Was she frightened of losing her independence? Could that happen? Had it happened to Jane? Certainly her sister had changed. She had become more settled: more content. And if she was to be honest, Jane now had a lot more freedom than she did. She also had a new best friend - a confidant who knew her more intimately than Lizzy ever had.
The thought of having that with Darcy made her squirm with trepidation; yet Jane and Bingley had been strangers to each other before they had made the leap. So really she was afraid of the unknown: afraid of the consequences of an intimacy that she had never experienced before. She supposed that it was possible that once she and Darcy had exchanged thoughts and feelings – really got to know each other - that he might not want her. Somehow she didn’t believe that would happen; but that was the gamble.
Well then, there was nothing else for it: she would leap.
Chapter 34
God guard me from those thoughts men think
In the mind alone;
He that sings a lasting song
Thinks in a marrow-bone
W.B. Yeats
He was standing with his back to the dimly lit room, looking out of the window. He must have heard her footsteps for he said quietly, without turning, “There is a fox on the lawn out there. I saw him, or another like him, the last time I stayed here.”
She joined him at the window. “He takes a chance: stepping out into the open like that. But I suppose there is little threat when all of us are in bed asleep,” she murmured.
“Elizabeth, why did you not let me know that your courtship was at an end?” Darcy asked in the same quiet voice, his eyes still following the progress of the animal moving across the lawn.
This polite enquiry was not what she had expected. In the past Darcy had been far more forceful when he had confronted her and this was a confrontation, despite his mild manner.
She felt shame surge through her. “I…”
He took a shaky breath and she realized that he was far more emotional than he had appeared to be. “No. Don’t answer that. I presumed from what was said this evening that you ended your relationship with the Reverend Pembroke because of me. That is probably not the case. I have no right to demand an explanation from you,” he said.
“You do have the right,” she said fiercely. “If anyone can hold me accountable it is you. You are the only one who ever truly gave their heart to me. Part of why I fell in love with you was because of your bravery that night at Pemberley. You are the reason that I ended things with Edmund. You showed me what it was to really love someone. Before that, the most I had hoped for was to be able to respect my husband.”
“Then why did you not write?”
“Because unlike you, I am a coward,” she said flatly. “I’m not proud of it, but once I ended things with Edmund, rather than approach you, I allowed myself to be persuaded that I would not be a fit partner - that I would only hurt you if we married. But it didn’t end there, when I at last came to understand myself a little better, I then convinced myself that too much water had gone under the bridge and that you would have found someone else.”
“You thought that I might have found someone else?” He looked at her with one eyebrow raised in disbelief.
“Yes… Well…” She shrugged in painful embarrassment. “As I said, I’m not proud of myself.”
He turned to face her. Taking both of her hands in his he looked into her eyes and said very quietly, “So you think that I am in the habit of laying my heart out, of exposing myself to others as I did to you that night at Pemberley?”
“No. Of course I don’t. I don’t know what I thought. I do know that it was only on harvest night that I even began to think about what it might be like to be married for love and it has taken until now to really believe that it could be true.”
“And now?”
“And now I know exactly how difficult it was for you to reveal yourself to me. I know that you meant what you said that night,” she whispered.
“And what do you say, Elizabeth?” he said pulling her closer to him.
“I say that I choose you,” she said quietly, looking up into his eyes with conviction.
His desire to touch her almost overwhelmed him. With shaking hands, he pushed his fingers through her hair, feeling out the shape of her skull. She heard her hairpins scattering around them as he bent his head and gently kissed her forehead and then her eyelids.
The softness of her curls brushed against his face. “I can’t believe that you are to be mine,” he said in a voice full of wonder. “Why am I so much more fortunate than my parents? They were miserable, Elizabeth. They disliked each other intensely, you know. I hardly ever saw them converse like normal people. I would say that the only thing they seemed to have in common was pride.”
She touched his face and looked into his eyes before asking earnestly, “Do you think that we will be happy together? It bothers me that we once fought so much.”
Darcy led her by the hand towards Charles’ favourite armchair. He pulled her onto his lap and she settled against him, laying her head on his chest and quietly breathing in his familiar smell.
“There are no guarantees, I suppose,” he said as he ran his fingers through her hair and held the strands up to the firelight.
“I can only speak for myself, Elizabeth, but we start off knowing much more about each other than our parents did. I already know that you have an intelligence and temper to match mine; that you are not concerned about appearances; that you are far too energetic to be a lady of fashion and that, in an argument, you are always convinced that you are right. I also know that you are a woman of great compassion, integrity and courage.”
Elizabeth shook her head. “Not courage. It was Jane who made me face up to myself tonight, or I might very well not have come down.”
“Yet here you are. Jane might have helped you to see things more clearly but did she march you down the stairs? No, Elizabeth. You faced your fear and overcame it on your own. When I told you how much I loved you that night at Pemberley, I too was terrified. There is no bravery without fear.”
He softly kissed the top of her head. “My sister tells me that I am in dire need of someone with a mind quick enough to counter my own. Someone who won’t allow me to rule the roost: so you can see that I need you. As for the rest…well, I think that we are well suited. We are both full of restless energy and curiosity and neither of us is too concerned with what people think of us. But the strongest reason of all is what I feel here,” he said, touching his fingers to his heart.
She put her hand on his. “When I first met you, I thought of you in opposition to myself. Everything was focused on my own fear of domination. Since I have come to love you, I no longer see your strength as a threat. It is part of what I love about you. So to me, love has come to mean recognizing who you are as a person and loving everything about you. It’s the recognition and treasuring of your uniqueness. I never understood that before, but I do now.”
A soft light appeared in his eyes and he nodded his agreement. He lifted her hand and kissed her fingers one by one. Then he asked, “When did you first realise that you loved me? At Pemberley, my own feelings were so strong that it was hard for me to accept that you were not ready to love me and that you might never come to feel as I did. It has been even harder for me since… But because I accepted that I couldn’t make you love me, I stayed away. I had to let you come to it on your own, but this last year without seeing or speaking to you has tested my faith. It has not been easy.”
“It has not been an easy year for me either. Falling in love was a slow process. I suppose somewhere in me was the knowledge that I had always been attracted to you. But it was only when you kissed me that night in the entrance hall at Pemberley that I admitted it to myself. In a way, I had to acknowledge my own prejudice against you first: which I did during the walk up to Monsal Head. The realization that I had been wrong about you put me on the back foot and then after you kissed me, I was completely confused. I saw you as temptation, and so resisting you became the honourable thing to do.
Darcy looked down at her tenderly. “My reaction to the news that Edmund was courting you was driven by nothing but jealousy. My feelings for you have made me irrational on more than one occasion. I don’t know what your idea of happiness is, my love, but if there is one thing that I have learned, it is that it is not total peace. In any life there will always be conflict, always occasional tension. Accepting that is what allows us to appreciate happiness. The most important thing is to resolve to be honest with ourselves and each other and never to allow ourselves to be conquered by fear. If you are agreeable, we could make it a rule that we always share a bed and never go to sleep angry.”
“I like that rule, but be warned, William, I am a rather bony person: all elbows and knees – or so my sisters tell me.”
“Aah! But I love your bones, Elizabeth. Particularly these…” he murmured, lifting her hair and nuzzling her slender neck at the soft hollow where it met her shoulder. As he caressed her, his mind returned involuntarily to a certain night at the theatre. He remembered the dancers that had crossed the stage: remembered the loneliness, the piercing pain of separation. He fell silent.
She seemed to sense a change and turned towards him, a look of enquiry on her face. Holding his head in her hands, she kissed his eyebrows. “What is it?”
“I was thinking of a time when I felt particularly lonely. It was after I first met you, my love. Charles and I had returned to London, and I had begun to question everything about myself. It was my lowest point, but it was then that things began to change for me.”
“It has been such a long road, I can’t believe that we have each other now,” she whispered, unable to resist sliding her hand beneath his cravat to feel the warm firmness of his skin.
He searched her face with smouldering eyes and her heart began to pound. Then his eyes fell to her lips and she heard the same soft groan she had heard once before. He reached for her and burying his hands in her hair, sucked gently on her bottom lip. Fire blazed through her veins.
Turning her head, Darcy slanted his mouth over hers, urgently deepening their kiss. She clung to his shoulders and then he was kissing her with a hunger that was overwhelming: that seemed to draw the very soul from her body.
___________________________
The grey light of dawn filtered through a gap in the curtains and fell upon the forms of Elizabeth and Darcy nestled together in Charles’ favourite armchair next to the dying fire. Their clothes were crumpled, their hair awry but in their sleep they clung to each other, their chests moving up and down in unison, their expressions blissful.
Jane shook her head in wonder. No one knew Elizabeth better than she. Her sister was mercurial and sometimes deeply vulnerable. All her life she had seemed to flit just out of reach, defying any attempt at possession. No one had ever managed to tie Elizabeth down - hold her still for even a moment.
She was pure energy and willpower. You never knew what she was thinking but once Elizabeth decided, she took action. Yet here was this restless, unpredictable, driven creature, peacefully enfolded in the arms of a man whom she had once supposedly detested. If Jane hadn’t seen it with her own eyes, she would be hard put to believe it.
Two days ago, Darcy had not featured as a suitable partner for her sister in Jane’s mind. Yet now when she looked back, it seemed that their attraction had been almost inevitable. As a couple, Elizabeth and Edmund had been equally clever; but in Darcy, Elizabeth had found her match in both intelligence and passion. Their children, Jane thought, would be amazing.
Chapter 35
For I would ride with you upon the wind,
Run on the top of the dishevelled tide,
And dance upon the mountains like a flame.
W.B. Yeats
There were clouds banked to the east but it was a clear night. The sky above Longbourn was studded with millions of stars, while on the ground cold gusts of wind rustled through the leaves of the trees bordering the driveway.
Darcy’s horse moved restively, occasionally blowing through his nose and lowering his head to remind his master of his presence and the need to return to the warmth of his stable. Darcy, who was usually concerned for his animals, was for once paying his horse no mind. His body might shift automatically to adjust to the animal’s movements but all his attention remained focused on the lady who stood on the gravel looking up at him.
“It will be a long night, I think,” he said. “I don’t imagine that I will fall asleep easily.”
“It is always so when one is as filled with anticipation as we are. Tomorrow cannot come soon enough. But for me, there are goodbyes to be said and for you there will be your family arrived from London. The time will pass speedily enough until bed.”
“Will you regret leaving your childhood home behind you, do you think?”
“My love, you know my needs. I’ve shown you all my secret places. Pemberley has trees, streams, rivers, woods and fields a-plenty. The sun will shine in my face and the wind will blow at my back as well there as it has always done here in Hertfordshire. I will be happy,” she sa
id simply.
“What about your family and the people of Longbourn?”
“I will miss them; but I would miss you a great deal more.”
“And so you are sending me about my business tonight, Miss Bennet?” asked Darcy teasing, but directing a longing look at her as he bent down to reach for her hand.
“Were it up to me, you could stay, sir. Unfortunately, my father would not welcome your presence in his house on the night before our wedding.”
Darcy lifted her hand to his lips. “Until tomorrow, my love,” he said tenderly and straightening up, urged his horse forward into the shadows that fell across the drive.
_______________________
It had been a week since Darcy had asked her father’s permission to marry her and a mere four days since she had welcomed him back from London with a special license in his pocket and the welcome news that his second cousin, Bishop Hettrick, would be officiating at their wedding.
At Mr. Bennet’s suggestion, the ceremony was to be held in the small, infrequently-used village church that bordered on Longbourn’s grounds, as this would enable the couple to avoid any awkwardness which might arise with Meryton’s incumbent pastor. An intimate ceremony, restricted to immediate family and the local villagers was planned. Preparations for the decoration of the small church and the wedding breakfast that was to follow were entirely under Kitty’s and Mrs. Hill’s control: Mrs. Bennet having uncharacteristically detached herself from the proceedings.
Mrs. Bennet had congratulated her daughter on her engagement but from the outset, her manner had been so constrained as to cause the rest of the family to wonder if something ailed her. However, it came as no surprise to Elizabeth who knew that, above all else, her mother hated to be proved wrong. Mrs. Bennet, having recently predicted that Elizabeth would never marry, now found it impossible to acknowledge that her least favourite daughter was not only marrying, but would have a husband who would exceed any mother’s wildest expectations.
The Golden Apples of the Sun Page 30